Poverty Is Killing Nearly 200,000 Americans a Year

The land of the free is suffering from a "self-inflicted" injustice when it comes to poverty, experts say, as the rich are getting richer while thousands living without sufficient means die every year in the United States, as a recent study shows. The issue, according to an exclusive poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek, worries a majority of Americans.

Research by the University of California, Riverside (UCR) published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the death of 183,000 Americans aged 15 years old and above in 2019—a year before the explosion of the pandemic were to make mortality rates in the country much, much worse—could be attributed to poverty, defined as those with incomes lower than 50 percent of the U.S. median.

In 2019, the median household income was $69,560. In the same year, about 34 million Americans—10.5 percent of the country's population—were estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be living in poverty.

Poverty remains a huge issue in the U.S., much more so than in other countries with similar levels of distributed wealth, and it is a cause of concern for a majority of Americans, as shown by the Newsweek/Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll. The poll, conducted among a sample of 1,500 eligible voters in the U.S. on May 31, found that some 53 percent of Americans are "very" concerned about the level of poverty in the country.

Among Democrats—identified as people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020—the number went up to 58 percent, while among Republicans—identified as people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020—48 percent said they were "very" concerned about poverty in the U.S.

Some 21 percent of Americans responding to the poll don't earn enough money from their primary job to pay bills or maintain their family's standard of living, while 52 percent are working multiple jobs to tackle the daily cost of living. More women (24 percent) than men (18 percent) said they didn't earn enough money to pay the bills, while more men (57 percent) than women (49 percent) said they were doing more than one job. The age cohort with the biggest percentage of people doing more than one job was 35-44, with 77 percent of respondents working multiple gigs.

UCR researchers found that poor people had roughly the same survival rates as wealthier people until they hit the age of 40, after which they died at a significantly higher rate than people with better incomes and resources. According to the UCR study, poverty—as a risk factor—can be considered the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

"As a risk factor, poverty kills more people than Alzheimer's, strokes, and diabetes," David Brady, professor of public policy at UCR and lead researcher in the study, told Newsweek. While death is the "ultimate bad outcome," poverty has also been linked to several negative health outcomes including stress and depression.

"Of course, there's some circularity with some health conditions," Brady said. "If you're physically disabled, you have a serious back injury and you can't work, that's probably going to make you more economically insecure, which then is going to feed into depression and so forth. These things all work together in concert."

The findings of the UCR study also reveal yet another way in which ethnic and racial minorities are disproportionately affected by issues linked to inequality, as these groups are more likely to live in poverty than white people, experts say.

Who Are America's Poor?

According to the latest data made available by the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2021 the official poverty rate in the U.S. was 11.6 percent, an estimated 37.9 million Americans—pretty much the same rate reported the year before, in 2020. In the same year, the median household income was $67,521—a decrease of 2.9 percent from the 2019 median and the first statistically significant decline since 2011.

In terms of age, race, and gender identity, America's poor are "a heterogeneous group of people," Kristin Seefeldt, associate director of Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, told Newsweek. "But children are more likely to experience poverty than working-age adults, women are more likely to experience poverty than men, and people of color are more likely to experience poverty than folks who identify as white."

These trends, Seefeldt said, reflect both historic and ongoing discrimination "in the policies we have in place in the U.S."

"Poverty is a policy choice," she said. "If we put in place more comprehensive health care, if we put in place better income support, we could do something about that, at least from an income perspective.

"We don't have parental leave policies like almost all of Western Europe has, so people who have children often have to miss work if their kids are sick, and that's lower income for them at the end of the day," she continued.

"These are decisions that we've made as a nation, and if we made some other choices, we could really do something pretty significant when it comes to reducing poverty."

According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data, 12.6 percent of women in the country lived in poverty in 2020, against 10.3 percent of men. In the same year, 16.0 percent of children under the age of 18—almost one in six kids—were poor, versus 8.9 percent of seniors (aged 65 or older). While 10.1 percent of white people lived in poverty in 2020, the rate went up to 20.0, 19.6, and 17.0 among Native Americans, Black, and Hispanic people, respectively.

Poverty is also much more fluid than people think, Mark Rank, one of the leading experts in poverty, inequality and social justice and a professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, told Newsweek.

"People move in and out of poverty during their lifetime," he said. "Nearly three-quarters of Americans will experience at least one year below the poverty line. For most people poverty is a fairly short-term experience, one or two years—they will get above the poverty line, and then something might happen that will throw them back into poverty, but some will get themselves out."

While most of Newsweek/Redfield & Wilton Strategies' survey respondents were concerned about the persistence of poverty in the country and some were directly affected, many said that the issue was somehow inevitable in a country bent toward economic growth.

Some 47 percent said they agreed that a certain amount of poverty is something that must be accepted in a capitalist, free-market society, while 20 percent disagreed. More Democrats (28 percent) strongly agreed with this opinion than Republicans (24 percent).

"I can't disagree with this position more," Matthew Desmond, sociologist, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of the book Poverty, by America, told Newsweek. "I think that there's a ton of evidence that government programs are effective [in fighting poverty]. We don't have to live with all this poverty in America."

Why Does Poverty Persist in America?

"For 50 years, the poverty rate in the U.S. has been remarkably stable," Rebecca Riddell, the economic justice policy lead for Oxfam America, told Newsweek.

Using the official definition and the latest census data, the poverty rate in the U.S. currently stands at 11.6 percent, Riddell said—not too far off from the 11.1 percent rate the country reported in 1973.

"That means that if you took a time machine and went back 50 years, the situation would be unchanged for the poor," Riddell said. "Meanwhile, the share of income held by the top 1 percent has grown astronomically."

For Riddell, rising wealth at the top and persistent poverty are "two sides of the same coin." The collective wealth of the so-called 1 percent—the wealthiest Americans—reached a record $45.9 trillion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, according to a 2022 Federal Reserve report on household wealth. During the pandemic, their wealth grew by over $12 trillion—more than a third of their total.

"Persistent poverty in the U.S. is really about policy choices," she said. "The choices that have been made on taxes, on the social safety net, on corporate power, on public services—those have not been designed in order to end poverty and hardship, and in many ways, they contributed to skyrocketing inequality."

Riddell called the persistence of poverty in America a "self-inflicted injustice."

For Rank, the reasons behind the persistence of poverty are that "there aren't enough jobs that pay a decent wage and that have decent benefits" and there's an insufficient security net for Americans struggling to make ends meet.

"Over the last 30 or 40 years, the U.S. has done a pretty good job in terms of creating new jobs, but many of those jobs are low-paying jobs, jobs that don't have benefits like health insurance," he said. "Another big structural failing is that the U.S. does not have a very robust social safety net to protect people from falling into poverty," he continued.

"So when things happen to people in their lives, like losing a job or getting sick, there's not a lot in place to protect people from falling into poverty."

According to Desmond, poverty persists in America "because we haven't made deep enough investments to fight this problem" and because "many of us benefit from poverty in America."

"Some lives are made small so that others might grow," he told Newsweek. "Often we don't recognize that we consume the cheap goods and services that the working poor produce...Half the country is invested in the stock market directly and indirectly, and they benefit from returns which come from human sacrifice, sometimes."

"We benefit from tax breaks, $1.8 trillion a year in tax breaks, which is double our military spending. Many of us are the beneficiaries of those tax breaks. And we perpetuate a system, or contribute or participate in a system, where we do a lot more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty," he added.

On top of that, Desmond said, we continue to create segregationist communities, where the most wealthy neighborhoods are inaccessible to those on lower incomes.

The sociologist believes that poverty in America is reflected by the fact that "the fundamentals of society are breaking down for a giant chunk of the American public," with many earning lower than livable wages and being trapped in a poverty cycle.

"If you look at wage stagnation on the one hand and rising housing costs, especially for renters, on the other, you get a situation where we have to kind of spend more to stay in the same place," Desmond said.

The lack of options for poor people in America, he believes, makes them more vulnerable to being exploited in the housing market, the job industry, and the financial system. By Desmond's calculation, the poor are paying $61 million in fines and fees every single day in overdraft fees, check-cashing fees and payday loan fees.

A Lesson From The Pandemic

According to Rank, it's ingrained within the American dream and the country's notorious individualism to believe that "poverty is the fault of the individual, the result of people's bad decisions" rather than a structural failing, as he believes it is.

But during the pandemic, this mindset suddenly changed. People realized that if so many were struggling to make ends meet, it was for reasons above their will—the spread of a deadly virus that led to business closures and major disruptions.

"During COVID, what you saw was an incredible investment from the federal government in the American people, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Society in the 1960s," Desmond said.

"The child tax credit that was rolled out during COVID-19 and reduced child poverty by 46 percent in six months," he added. "Emergency rental assistance, which was a $46.5 billion program and reached over 10 million working families, plunged evictions to the lowest they've ever been on record, ever. This shows that government programs work."

Riddell said that the investments made by the federal government to help lower-income people cope during the pandemic really paid off, with "census data showing that the pandemic era safety net program kept many millions of people out of poverty."

The pandemic might have changed the way Americans see poverty—but it was only temporary. When these investments ended after the health emergency was to be considered concluded, the situation for many living on the verge of poverty got worse, Riddell said. "People are facing higher inflation, which is really proving a challenge for many households."

There is no data available to estimate poverty rates for 2022 and 2023 yet.

Can We Finally End Poverty?

"Never in the history of rich democracies does social policy happen instantaneously," Brady said. "It takes decades of political struggle to push for more generous social policies to reduce your poverty and inequality, and it takes political struggle to maintain the social policies you have."

According to Desmond, there are three things the country should do to end poverty: make deeper investments, funded through fair tax implementation; implement policies that fight the exploitation of the poor through overdraft fees and payday loans, and give low-income workers more options in terms of housing and unionizing; and end the segregation of the poor, making communities and school systems more inclusive.

Rank believes that to tackle poverty, we need to both create a "robust social safety net that provides the kind of protections and benefits that people need when they lose a job or when they get sick" and raise wages.

"Getting low-wage workers' wages up to a decent level would be a substantial benefit in terms of reducing poverty," he said. "I think those are two things that can be done, there's no reason why we can't."

Our poll shows that 51 percent of Americans believe that higher minimum wages, rather than strict work requirements for welfare recipients (39 percent), would provide a better incentive for those on welfare to find work. While 63 percent of Democrats surveyed supported this measure, only 40 percent of Republicans agree. Among Republicans (51 percent), stricter work requirement for welfare payments was considered a better incentive—a solution that was embraced by only 28 percent of Democrats.

Some 73 percent said they support a higher minimum wage that would allow those working a minimum wage job for 40 hours a week to pay their bills and maintain a decent standard of living. Some 83 percent of Democrats agreed with this statement, against 65 percent of Republicans.

Republicans and Democrats have traditionally had a different approach to tackling poverty. According to a 2019 study by the Cato Institute, a majority of Democrats (69%), independents (76 percent), and Republicans (90 percent), believe that more economic growth will better help people in poverty.

Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former chief economic policy adviser to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, wrote about "reducing poverty the Republican way." The problem, Holtz-Eakin said, is not poverty, but the fact that "too many Americans are not self-sufficient." Instead of strengthening the welfare system and throwing money at the problem, the economist says, the government should implement pro-work policies and fund education.

According to the economist, raising the minimum wage would dampen job growth, instead of helping low-wage workers—an opinion shared by many in the GOP.

Solving poverty won't only help the poor but also the rest of America.

"A death is expensive," Brady said. "In our study, we found that people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s are the ones who are really experiencing that poverty-related mortality. When somebody dies at 50, that's a breadwinner for a family, a caretaker parent that is dying, and that costs a family enormously—not to mention the medical expenses that go with the death."

"There's a moral duty to eradicate poverty, but there are also economic benefits to tackling the issue," Seefeldt added. "In purely economic terms, people who have higher incomes have more money to inject into the economy. When people are able to see a doctor for preventative care, less money gets spent dealing with really significant health care problems down the line.

"Kids who are fed properly and are healthy are more likely to become adults who are healthy and can contribute to the overall economic well-being of the country. So if you want to put it in dollars and cents terms, there's a strong economic argument for tackling poverty."

Whose Job Is It to Tackle Poverty?

A majority of respondents to the Newsweek/Redfield & Wilton Strategies survey believe that it should be up to the federal (62 percent), state (55 percent) and local (54 percent) governments to tackle poverty. Among Democrats, the percentage of respondents who thought the federal government should tackle poverty went up to 70 percent, while among Republicans it was 56 percent.

Desmond agrees, saying that the government "bears quite a lot of responsibility for tolerating so much poverty in this land of abundance," especially as federal programs to help people on lower incomes during the pandemic have proven so effective at tackling poverty.

"We can absolutely end poverty, we have the resources to do it," Desmond said. "But we have to reject this scarcity mindset and this boring, pernicious 'best we can do-ism' mentality that has gripped the policy debate," he continued, adding that America is currently lacking the will to end poverty.

"We used to have moral ambitions in poverty in America," he said. "When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, they set a deadline, it wasn't just rhetoric." But as a collective public, Desmond added, and as a government, we are currently lacking this ambition.

"Imagine what the country would look like tomorrow if everyone was paid a living wage," Riddell said. "Or if we really had an infrastructure that truly supported care work and valued it. The failure to address poverty in the U.S. isn't about a lack of good ideas or potential solutions. It's about a lack of political will."

"Our poverty level is the direct consequence of our weak social policies, which are a direct consequence of weak political actors," Brady said. "And that's the principal reason—it's not because we have people that behave worse than other countries."

Update 6/20/23, 2:45 a.m. ET: This article was updated to amend Kristin Seefeldt's title.